Martyrs are needed to create incidents. Incidents are needed to create revolutions. Revolutions are needed to create progress.

I would sit in my room and become hysterical about the wild incredible story I was writing. And I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference.

American violence is public life, it's a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form.

A scholar's ink lasts longer than a martyr's blood.

It is the cause and not merely the death that makes the martyr.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.